Conversations among Partners in Learning

English Teachers from the Schools and Colleges in Dialogue

Sponsored by the English Department of the College of Arts and Sciences, Georgia State University,

and the Georgia Humanities Council

9:00 A.M. – 3:00 P.M.

Aderhold Learning Center, Georgia State University

Fourteenth Conversation

                                           

Starting the Conversation

9:00 A.M. – 9:15 A.M.

Keynote Address:

9:15 A.M.  - 10:15 A.M.

Aderhold Learning Center Room #24

"A Tale of Three Books and Five Women: How Art and Life Can Be Inextricable"

Professor Frances Smith Foster

Charles Howard Candler Professor of English and Women’s Studies

and Chair of the Department of English at Emory University

Centering Harriet Jacob’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Slave: A True Story by Mende Nazar as her central texts, Professor Smith Foster’s keynote address will highlight the importance and necessity of teaching African American literature in the classroom.  She argues that African American literature, like other literatures, can have very practical value to people of various cultures. Pulling from her expertise in early African American letters, Smith Foster will show us how stories of the past can and do impact lives in the present and just how literary history and literary interpretations can be created, challenged and revised by a few individuals working together with persistence, perspicacity, and a passion to write things right.   

Breakout Sessions – Participants choose three workshops to attend during the course of the day

Workshop #1: 10:20 A.M. – 11:20 A.M.

Workshop #2: 11:30 A.M. – 12:30 P.M.

Lunch Break: 12:30 P.M. - 1:30 P.M.

Workshop #3: 1:30 P.M. - 2:30 P.M.

Roundtable Wrap Up: 2:30P.M. – 3:00 P.M.

Session Titles

“The Slave Narrative Genre and its Legacy” Dr. Carol Marsh-Lockett ( Georgia State University) and Marcia Jackson ( B.E. Mays High School)

Using Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl as a starting reference, this session will examine the various approaches to teaching the slave narrative genre and explore innovative  directions for engaging student reading of neo-slave narratives such as Margaret Walker’s Jubilee, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and Lorene Cary’s The Price of a Child. 

 “The Final Frontier: African American Males in the Classroom and the Uses of Fiction, Friendship and Popular Culture” Dr. Lawrence Jackson ( Emory University)

Middle school and high school literature teachers are the "final frontier" of African American men's educational careers and often enough their reading lives! In college I see this population of students quite rarely. Taking this phenomenon into account, how can the classroom become a site for revolutionary pedagogy? My session emphasizes two dynamic literary resources: Ralph Ellison's novel "Invisible Man" and Edward P. Jones' collection of short stories "Lost in the City." By combining the epic bildungsroman of modern American experience with tales of forgotten black men in the cities, we can build a foundation for a lifetime of active mental engagement.

“Understanding Black Speech (signifying and sermon) and Black Music (spirituals, worksongs, blues, jazz, and rap) as the Poetic References for Teaching African American Literature” Dr. Hazel A. Ervin ( Morehouse College)

What is African American literature? How should it be approached? How does one enter discussions with the authors and characters about the creative process and the function of the literature?

“As Above So Below:  Manifestations of Spirituality in Edouard Glissant's The Ripening” Dr. Georgene Bess Montgomery ( Clark Atlanta University)

This workshop will explore African spirituality in Glissant's The Ripening, Tina McElroy Ansa's Baby of the Family, and the film The Best Man. The emphasis on African spirituality includes examining the Orishas, ritual, divination, and initiation through the texts' use of colors, numbers, symbols, signs, myths, legends, etc. and how it is manifested and referenced in African American literary texts and film. The workshop will teach the participants the paradigm so that they will able to identify and decode the texts.

“Critical Thinking and African American Women’s Language (AAWL) in Literature: A Pedagogical Perspective” Dr. Mary Zeigler ( Georgia State University)

“If we are to believe the majority of writers of Negro dialect and burnt-cork artists, Negro speech is a weird thing, full of ‘ams’ and ‘Ises.’  Fortunately, we don’t have to believe them.  We may go directly to the Negro and let [her] speak for [herself].”  (Zora Neale Hurston, “Characteristics of Negro Expression,” The Sanctified Church. Turtle Island Foundation, New York:  Marlowe & Company, 1981, 41-78]

“In the mouth of the Negro the English language loses its stiffness, yet conveys its meaning accurately [ Hurston, “The Sanctified Church: Spirituals and Neo-spirituals” The Sanctified Church : 81]

And go directly to the Negro, Zora did.  For as a linguistic anthropologist, having studied with and researched impirically in the first hand experiences of Blacks for the WPA, she utilized a critical knowledge of Black language to supplement her natural cultural language inclinations.  Her female informants tell their stories of their life and their times through their language, flowing with flavor yet never losing its accuracy. And so did Toni and Gloria and Paule and Alice, go directly to the Negro.  For they followed in the firmly grounded, critically cultural and linguistic thinking that Zora modeled in the depiction of African American women’s language (AAWL).  But, how can we understand the voice of African American women in literature without thinking critically about the language through which they express that voice?  That is the question.  How is critical thinking an essential application to AAWL in literature? 

This study approaches that question from a pedagogical perspective:  First examining the terms “critical thinking,” a more familiar pedagogy term with a larger implication, and “AAWL,” a less familiar cultural linguistic term with a greater implication; then utilizing examples of AAWL from  Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Paule Marshall, and Alice Walker to illustrate the features of AAWL; then annotating each of these features with critical thinking descriptors; and then concluding with a re-iteration of the means by which we apply critical thinking to language in literature.

“Muddied Waters:  Music in Post-Civil Rights African American Migration Narratives“ Lisa Lakes Griffin ( Tuskegee University)

Description TBA!

The break-out sessions will be presented at 10:20, 11:30 and 1:30 so that participants may attend three sessions during the course of the day. Consult the enclosed biographies to help you in making your selections.

The Aderhold Learning Center (#14 on the campus map found on the reverse side) is located at 60 Luckie Street, a one way street from Peachtree which runs towards Centennial Olympic Park. Parking will be available for $6 in the G Deck at GSU, which may be entered from Collins Street off Decatur Street. There are also closer parking garages, including Central Parking at 100 Luckie Steet and at 103 Luckie Street (for $10) and AAA Parking at 90 Forsyth on the corner of Forsyth and Luckie (for $5). 

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Fourteenth Conversation

Critical Approaches to Teaching African American Literature

REGISTRATION FORM: PLEASE RESPOND BY March 8, 2008

Registration Fee: Teachers ($20) Students ($10)

Coffee, refreshments, and lunch are included.

Name:                                                 E-Mail Address:

School:                                                       Home Address (or school, if you prefer):

Telephone:

Please select from the following sessions in order of your preference:

_____­­______     ““The Slave Narrative Genre and its Legacy”

___________      “The Final Frontier: African American Males in the Classroom and the Uses of Fiction, Friendship and Popular Culture”

___________     “Understanding Black Speech and Black Music as the Poetic References for Teaching African American Literature”

___________      “Muddied Waters:  Music in Post-Civil Rights African American Migration Narratives”

___________     “As Above So Below:  Manifestations of Spirituality in Edouard Glissant's The Ripening” 

___________     “Critical Thinking and African American Women’s Language in Literature: A Pedagogical Perspective”

Please tear along the dotted line and mail payment (check or money order made out to Georgia State University) to English Department, Conversations among Partners in Learning, Georgia State University, P.O. Box 3970, Atlanta, GA 30302-3970.  Please contact Dr. Kameelah Martin Samuel (kmartin@gsu.edu) or Dr. Renée Schatteman (schatteman@gsu.edu) with any questions or concerns.

Online Registration Here

Biographical Sketches

Co-Directors:

Dr. Renée Schatteman, Associate Professor of English at Georgia State, is the co-founder and co-director of GSU English department’s teacher outreach initiatives. She brings ten years of secondary English teaching to Georgia State University. Besides working on her own specialty (postcolonial literature) and directing the Conversations and Annual lecture programs, she has worked with the College of Education to improve GSU’s teacher education program, has published articles on collaboration between colleges of education and colleges of arts and sciences, and has co-directed a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute on women’s literature of South Africa and the American South. Dr. Schatteman’s publications include a three-volume curriculum guide to African literature entitled Voices from the Continent (Africa World Press). She is currently compiling a collection of interviews with the writer Caryl Phillips to be published by the University Press of Mississippi in the spring of 2009in their Conversations Series.

Dr. Kameelah Martin Samuel, Assistant Professor of English at Georgia State University, teaches courses in Twentieth century American and African American literature, including a graduate seminar on Toni Morrison.  Her area of specialization focuses on African American folklore, spirituality, and the conjuring tradition.  Her current project, Conjuring Moments and Other Such Hoodoo is a historiography of the conjure woman figure in African American literature and culture. She has published articles on authors Tina McElroy Ansa and Elizabeth Nunez in the forthcoming African American National Biography ( Oxford).  Dr. Martin Samuel also has scholarly interests in African American genealogy, writing family histories, and the work of Georgia author Tina McElroy Ansa.

Keynote Speaker:

Dr. Frances Smith Foster is Charles Howard Candler Professor of English and Women’s Studies and Chair of the Department of English at Emory University.  She has also taught at University of California, San Diego, San Diego State University, Cass Technical High School in Detroit and Western Hills High School in Cincinnati, Ohio.  She has received several honors for teaching and research, including being Emory University Scholar/Teacher of the Year and Walt Whitman Scholar in American Literature by the Fulbright Association.  Foster has published extensively on African American literature from science fiction and women poets of the black arts movement to theories of the beginnings of African American literature and culture.  She has authored or edited 14 books including Written By Herself: Literary Production by African American Women, 1746-1892, Witnessing Slavery: The Antebellum Slave Narrative, The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, The Oxford Companion to African American Literature, and Behind the Scenes by Elizabeth Keckley.  Her most recent publication is Love and Marriage in Early African America, a collection of writings by African Americans for African Americans.  Dr. Smith Foster will initiate our conversation by reflecting on her extensive teaching record and expertise to offer the Atlanta Metro area English and Language Arts community an insightful discourse on the value and artistry of teaching African American literature within Georgia ’s educational systems.

Keynote Address: "A Tale of Three Books and Five Women: How Art and Life Can Be Inextricable"

Break-out Session Leaders:

Dr. Carol Marsh-Lockett's wide-ranging teaching and research interests are in African-American Literature and African-American women's literature, Caribbean literature, Postcolonial literature, and 17th-century literature (the Jonsonian Court Masque). Her scholarship has led her to the study of the intersections between these bodies of literature. Dr. Marsh-Lockett has previously published on Martin Robinson Delany, who is perhaps best known for his pioneering efforts in Pan-Africanism, and on several African-American women, including Tina McElroy Ansa, Pearl Cleage, Zora Neale Hurston, Ntozake Shange. She was the guest editor of the Decolonizing Caribbean Literature issue of Studies in the Literary Imagination (Fall, 1996) as well as the Caribbean Women Writers in Exile: Anglophone Writers issue (Fall, 2004).  Dr. Marsh-Lockett is Associate Professor of English at Georgia State University.

                        Session title: “The Slave Narrative and Its Legacy”

Dr. Lawrence Jackson is an Associate Professor of English and African American Studies at Emory University.  He specializes in courses dealing with twentieth century African American literature.  He is the author of Ralph Ellison: Emergence of Genius (2002).  He has published essays in Antioch Review, New England Quarterly, Massachusetts Review, American Literary History, and American Literature.  He has held fellowships at the National Humanities Center, the WEB DuBois Center, the Ford Foundation, and the Stanford Humanities Center.  He has two forthcoming projects: a memoir called Black Like Nobody I Know and a literary history called A Renaissance of Indignation: A History of African American Writers and Critics, 1934-1960.

Session title: "The Final Frontier: African American Males in the Classroom and the Uses of Fiction, Friendship and Popular Culture"

Dr. Hazel Arnette Ervin, is an Associate Professor of English and Director of the General Education Program at Morehouse College. In additional to directing the core curriculum she also teaches African American literature courses such as Harlem Renaissance, Majors Authors, and Contemporary Fiction in African American literature. A 2001Fulbright Scholar, NEH and UNCF/Andrew Mellon recipient, and a Who’s Who in Black Atlanta  biographee, Ervin is also editor of African American Literary Criticism 1773-2000 (1999); Ann Petry’s Short Fiction: Critical Essays (co-authored, 2004); The Handbook of African American Literature (2006); The Critical Response to Ann Petry(2006); and Ann Petry: A Bio-Bibliography.

Session title: “Understanding Black speech (signifying and sermon) and Black Music (spirituals, worksongs, blues, jazz, and rap) as the Poetic References for Teaching African American Literature”

Lisa Lakes Griffin is an Assistant Professor in English at Tuskegee University and a UNCF/Mellon Fellow.  She worked extensively with the Florida State University’s First-Year Writing Program as the program assistant for two years and previously worked with the Center for the Study and Teaching of Writing at The Ohio State University.  She also taught high school English for three years.  She completes her doctoral degree in African American Literature from Florida State University this spring.  Her research interests center on the function of the African concept of ogbanje as memory in post civil rights African American migration narratives.

Session title: “Muddied Waters:  Music in Post-Civil Rights African American Migration Narratives”

Dr. Georgene Bess Montgomery is an active participant in Georgia ’s literary community, having participated in Hands on Atlanta’s “From Freedom Riders to Freedom Writers Literary Series” in 2007 and Tina McElroy Ansa’s annual Sea Island Writer’s Retreat in 2004.  Dr. Bess Montgomery earned her undergraduate degree in English and Journalism and her Master’s degree in English from Georgia Southern University.  She began her teaching career at GSU, earning several teaching awards for her dedication and service to the student body during her tenure.  She is currently an Assistant Professor of English at Clark Atlanta where her teaching interests include autobiography and memoir, advanced rhetoric and composition, as well as African American and Caribbean literatures.  She is the author of the Mari Evans biography and her current project, As Above, So Below: A Theory of Spirituality in Africana Literary Criticism is forthcoming from Africa World Press.     

Session title: “As Above So Below:  Manifestations of Spirituality in Eduoard Glissant's The Ripening”

Dr. Mary Zeigler is Associate Professor of English Language and Linguistics in the English Department at Georgia State University.  She teaches courses in English language theory, history, grammar, variation/ dialects, and applications in teaching.  She received her BA degree from South Carolina State College (now University) with a major in English and minors in Speech and Education, her MA from Atlanta University, and her PhD in English from the University of Georgia with a concentration in English Linguistics and minors in Medieval Literature and American Literature to 1900. Dr. Zeigler focuses her research on the socio-cultural implications of language growth, change, and difference and the morpho-syntactic features that influence language growth.  She is guided by the perspective that language is not only a product of a society, as evidenced in its written texts and literature, but it is also a process of society, as explicated in its oral texts and articulated community discourse and interactions.  Her current research involves a project that explicates the linguistic implications of regional and social variation in the instruction of reading and writing. She has published extensively in her field and has traveled to England , Canada , Hawaii, Ghana , and Italy listening to people talk. 

Session title: "Critical Thinking and African American Women’s Language (AAWL) in Literature:  A Pedagogical Perspective"